A investment in space pays off at home: Editorial

The great cliche from Americans opposed to funding the space program has been for half a century: "Why don't we solve problems down here on the planet first before wasting all that money up there?"

If the answer is the positive terrestrial payoff from the orange juice substitute Tang, these Earthlings have a point.

But when the investment in space helps solve the most vexing problem of our time -- climate change and its effect on future generations -- the naysayers have no point at all.

The work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge is still mostly concerned with launching probes into the solar system. But learning how to send robots millions of miles away has created an institution ready to tackle nearly any problem.

High atop Mount Wilson, JPL has placed devices that measure first carbon dioxide, and then methane and other greenhouse gases.

The lab says the sensors for the first time provide continuous, high accuracy measurements of the "mixing ratios" of CO2 and other carbon gases. The instrument on Mount Wilson scans the atmosphere many times per day to measure the gases in the air above the Los Angeles basin; another remote-sensing instrument at Caltech in Pasadena provides continuous daytime measurements from the valley floor.

Alicia Chang of the Associated Press visited the campus and says that instrument is actually "a refurbished vintage solar telescope on the roof of a laboratory" that "captures sunlight and sends it down a shaft 60 feet below where a prism-like instrument separates out carbon dioxide molecules. "

Reasonable people without a political agenda can agree on the general problem of rising temperatures and the effect on ocean levels, agriculture and the weather.

But until scientists pinpoint the precise level of the chemicals producing the problem, solutions can be harder to offer.

In the city of Los Angeles, elected officials agreed six years ago to reduce emissions to 35 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. They vowed to shift to renewable energy and stop the city's dependence on out-of-state coal-fired plant as well as limiting huge diesel emissions from the ports and retrofitting city buildings to meet energy-conserving LEED standards.

Thanks to JPL's instruments here on Earth, there will be a better idea of the base numbers so that we'll know where we stand.

And the next generation of remote-sensing instruments will be deployed on three satellites in geostationary orbits to provide "near-continuous, wall-to-wall mapping of nearly every urban area on Earth. "

That famous, full-planet photo astronauts took returning from the moon in 1972 is credited with helping to launch environmentalism.

Now NASA continues to protect our planet home in more measurable ways.